Over the years, and I’m talking about years ago, I spent a lot of time in Kansas City. This was mainly because if you won enough in the state of Texas and you were an NAIA school, you got to go to Kansas City and stay for a couple of days, or a week, or as long as you were winning.

In the mid 1960’s when I took over the broadcasting for Howard Payne, that was something that was pretty exciting for me. I think 1964 was the first year that I broadcast for the Yellow Jackets, and at the end of that season, if they won the Lone Star Conference and if they won a playoff series, then they got to go to Kansas City and I got to go. The first trip was on a charter bus and we had a ball – I mean an absolute ball! The second time I went we were in station wagons that the college had. I don’t remember but we went four or five times throughout the 1960’s and it was an amazing time – I say amazing – for a bunch of young people it was the big time – I mean the REAL big time. Kansas City was a treat for all of us, well maybe one or two not, but for most of us.

I remember playing our first ballgame in Kansas City and we were playing Georgia Southern. We had the last game of the first day and that meant we were starting about 10:00 at night. Danny Faubian hit an almost full length shot. After he got the inbounds pass and the buzzer sounded, he had heaved it almost the full length of the court. Today we would have won the ballgame but back then it only counted for two as it swished through and we went to overtime and Georgia Southern beat us. Then somebody else beat us the next year and then somebody else after that. It was Fred Davis’s senior year when we finally won a game in Kansas City. We thought we could win two that year but we got swamped the second game.

Kansas City was a big deal back when and it broke my heart to watch on TV the other day as Kansas City’s football team celebrated the Super Bowl and a couple of – whatever you want to call them – decided to start shooting at each other in a crowd of about 800 or 900 thousand people, and people got hit. A female disc jockey, very popular in Kansas City, was killed. Twenty-five were injured, a lot were kids, all because these guys decided they had to show off to the other one. Nothing – nothing – but nothing should have happened over this incident.

A lot of the places they showed in Kansas City were very familiar to me. It broke my heart that somebody had to die during a celebration. That’s nuts! All is can do is tell you when you go out to something, regardless of what you think, just be careful – be very careful – because in this day and time anything can happen. All we did in Kansas City was play and party and eat and all of that stuff, and I think that’s all that most of those people wanted to do the other day, but somebody had to die. We need to do a lot better.

Until next time, so long everybody.

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‘Out of the Box’ with Dallas Huston is published each Monday morning at BrownwoodNews.com. Dallas was the radio voice of the Brownwood Lions and Howard Payne Yellow Jackets for more than 55 years. He currently is Pastor of Center City Baptist Church and hosts a Men’s Bible Study in Brownwood on Monday evenings. Your comments are welcome at [email protected].